Exhibitions

All The Devils Are Here

Limbo Project Space, Margate
24/08/23 – 30/08/23

Throughout the yawning aeons of time, organisms have lived in accordance with light - save for the precious multitude of sulphur dwelling worms and associated bacteria. Drawing on the seemingly boundless power of the sun, our Earth was formed in its image - giving rhythm, pattern and form to all those lucky enough to experience the cycle of life and death.

Soon enough creatures began to harness light, turning it into food and energy to fulfil both their wildest and most mundane dreams. In that blinking moment nothing that came before would ever be the same.

Fast forward around a billion years to the slopes of an unspecified volcano and witness early humans picking up and knapping away at volcanic glass. Note the tiny slivers flying off and slicing hands before they are hafted to a pointy stick to make what is in essence a very pointy stick. Long before our ancestors had mastered copper, bronze or iron, we were wielding glass as a tool and a technology.

Fast forward again to the Assyrian city of Nineveh in 700 BCE. An unknown craftsperson is sweatily beavering away over an open cast in a building constructed of packed mud. Unwittingly, this probably bearded artisan was setting off a cascade of iconography for alien ideas and even more alien religions. Notions still many centuries ahead into the swirling mists of time, and the minds of other bearded men yet to be born.

These artefacts from the height of Mesopotamian power mostly took the form of pendants and jewels for the adornment of carved lions with their gaping maws. Guided by the Phoenicians, master traders and accidental inventors of clear glass, it spread across the Mediterranean.

Time passed, in stutters and leaps, and without going into the frankly tedious history of European Christianity, the world of glass that we are familiar with in the West took form. Beginning in earnest in the 12th Century, centred around the French city of Chartres.

Overwhelmingly, just as it was in Iran some centuries earlier, stained glass in Europe was focused on God related things. High windows in cathedrals, unseen by the lowly congregation were to the glory of God in the heavens. In this modern take on medieval storytelling, it is the Devil that takes precedence.

The works in this room are at eye level or below - to the praise not of a higher being but our own human reality, and the Devil that sits so squat below the soil. The combination of traditional techniques and motifs alongside contemporary imagery create something new, borne of the past but existing in the present.

Stained glass in Europe has always spoken in confusing wrinkles and shimmers to morality, life and death. And so, with hair stood up like reeds please enjoy the exhibition. The stories in the mirrors are yet to be told, but we are all of us in good company, for Hell is empty, and all the Devils are here.

Words by Ned Suesat-Williams